Last January, Italy was electrified by the report of a boy savagely beaten to death in an Alpine village. Since then, media attention has focused on the child's mother, accused of the crime, writes Paddy Agnew.
It was a scream of pain and anguish that was to change forever the life of both the Lorenzi family and the beautiful, tranquil Alpine village in which they lived. That scream came at about 8.30 a.m. on January 30th on a bright sunny day in the ski-resort of Cogne, in the region of Aosta close to the Italo-French border.
Thirty-one-year-old Anna Maria Franzoni's howl of anguish alerted her close neighbour, psychiatrist Ada Satragni, who ran the short distance to the Franzoni/Lorenzi house to be confronted with a scene of mind-boggling horror. She found Anna Maria's three-year-old son Samuele lying in a pool of blood in his parent's bed, his head apparently badly damaged and with the walls of the bedroom splattered with blood. Subsequent medical examination found that the child had been hit 17 times with a heavy if not large object, something like an ashtray.
Satragni attempted first aid, giving the child a cortisone injection, washing his wounds and carrying him out to the front veranda of the house in readiness for the helicopter-ambulance, already summoned by Franzoni and which duly arrived at 8.51 a.m.
By 9.19 a.m., little Samuele had been loaded onto the helicopter to be taken to hospital in Aosta. He arrived at 9.47 a.m., only to be pronounced dead some seven minutes later. In reality, even though police medical experts admit that it is almost impossible to determine the precise time of Samuele's death, the child probably died at around 8.30 a.m. In other words, he died shortly after he had been brutally attacked.
The above information comes from the "Preliminary Detention Arrest Warrant" issued by Judge Fabrizio Gandini some six weeks later on March 14th (and later published in its entirety by weekly news magazine Panorama). Judge Gandini ordered that Franzoni be held in pre-trial custody, relative to murder charges.
The arrest of Anna Maria Franzoni looked like the logical outcome to a case that had generated obsessive, round-the-clock media interest. Carried along on a tide of country-wide ghoulishness, prime-time TV talk shows, radio phone-ins, newspapers and magazines had all devoted huge time and energy to the "Cogne Killing".
In a manner perhaps similar to the Kerry Babies case of 1980s Ireland, two aspects of the "Cogne Mystery" attracted morbid popular interest. For a start, there was the hideousness of the alleged crime itself, namely infanticide.
Secondly, there was the unlikely environmental context of the killing. Not only is Cogne a seemingly idyllic Alpine valley village of some 1,400 citizens, but also both Anna Maria Franzoni and her husband Stefano Lorenzi were considered upstanding and respectable members of the community. Although both of them came from faraway Bologna (they moved to Cogne in the early 1990s), they seemed well-integrated, Anna Maria having worked in local hotels and Stefano serving not only in the local voluntary mountain rescue service but also as a town councillor.
Almost from the start, and with a cavalier disregard for Anglo-Saxon concepts of sub-judice, media commentators had suggested that Anna Maria Franzoni must have killed her own child. Expert after expert nightly regaled TV audiences on the possibility of a "raptus follia", moment of total madness, on the part of "a" mother.
At first glance, no other explanation afforded itself. She herself claimed that she was out of her house for just eight to 10 minutes between approximately 8.16 a.m. and 8.24 a.m. on the morning of the killing. She left the house to accompany her other child, six-year-old Davide, to the school bus. That evidence was subsequently corroborated by the school bus driver.
Franzoni claimed that it was only when she returned to her house, a villa on the hills just outside the village, that she discovered Samuele had been attacked. If that evidence is true, then the killer would have had, at most, 10 minutes in which to enter the Lorenzi household, pummel the child to death and make an escape.
The short time spell and the fact that no strange or suspicious person had been seen in or around the Lorenzi villa either by Franzoni herself or by her neighbours prompted commentators (and investigators, it would seem) to conclude that the killer might be one of the family. Given that Lorenzi was nearly 30 kilometres up the road on his way to work at Aosta at the time of the attack, all fingers seemed to point to Franzoni.
Subsequent forensic evidence only worsened her position; experts found more than 200 stains of Samuele's blood on her clogs and pyjamas. Nor did her seemingly cold and distant manner, allied to a carefully manicured and made-up appearance, do much to help her in the media-directed eyes of a public opinion that was fast subjecting her to trial by nationwide TV jury.
A further complication for Franzoni was the fact that, at 5.50 a.m. on the morning of Samuele's murder, Lorenzi had called the emergency services saying that his wife did not feel well. The doctor who treated Anna Maria could find nothing physically wrong with her, concluding that she was suffering from a "panic attack". Two hours after that "panic attack", little Samuele was dead in a pool of his own blood.
The bloodstained clothing, the time spans on the morning of the killing, Franzoni's distant manner and her "panic attack" all seemed to point in only one direction. Yet, within two weeks of her arrest, Franzoni was released from prison, apparently on grounds of insufficient evidence. Among other things, no murder weapon has ever been found. Furthermore, the initial investigations were deeply flawed, partly because no fewer than 13 different people, including neighbours and medical services, had tramped in and out of the murder scene, moving objects and destroying potential evidence in the confusion of the first half hour subsequent to Franzoni's raising the alarm.
Franzoni herself had already protested her innocence. Just days before her arrest and aware of the growing suspicions against her, she had told Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, that she was "afraid for everyone who lives in Cogne, and for all the children in Cogne" because "whoever killed Samuele is still there".
Needless to add, such comments did not endear her to the good folks of Cogne, people who until then had been generally supportive of her case and who had steered a wide berth of the invasive media posse. Relations with the people of Cogne soured even more when Franzoni and husband Lorenzi both spoke of potentially "jealous neighbours" and then sent friends round to the police station to point to those same suspect neighbours.
With a judicial investigation into the killing still ongoing, Franzoni continues to fight to clear her name. She recently changed her defence lawyer, hiring the media friendly, high-profile solicitor Carlo Taormina, who also just happens to have served as Junior Interior Minister in the current centre-right government of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. (Taormina was forced to resign last autumn after he had publicly attacked magistrates investigating Berlusconi on bribery and corruption charges.)
Last month, she also went on the prime-time Maurizio Costanzo TV chat show (on Berlusconi's Channel Five) to launch a dramatic appeal to the killer to give himself/herself up. In that same programme, she also announced that she was pregnant, thus seeming to confirm a promise allegedly made to her husband on the morning of Samuele's murder. One policeman present at the murder scene testified that, even as the helicopter was taking off with little Samuele's body, he had heard Franzoni promise her distraught husband Stefano that they would have another child.
Just last week, Taormina claimed that he knew the identity of the Cogne killer, adding that he would reveal it to magistrates. While waiting for this complex case to unfold, it may be worth recalling the conclusions written by judge Gandini at the end of his comprehensive, 80-page arrest warrant last March: "Judicial error is always possible. The weight of investigative evidence against Ms Franzoni is heavy. Ms Franzoni killed her son. But perhaps this cannot be considered a murder or a killing in the classic sense of the term. At the back of this crime may lurk a family tragedy. Our judgment must limit itself to the criminal relevance of the facts."